all-the general stimulus along the line of one's whole nature-is the only true benefit of contact with the great; more than this is hurtful. Nowadays you do not want an author to tell you how many times a day to pray, to prescribe how many inches wide shall be the hem of your garment. This the Master never did; too well he knew the growth of personality which would settle these matters, each for itself; too well he knew the subtle hurt of all such violations of modern individualism ; and after our many glimpses of the heartiness with which George Eliot recognized the fact and function of human personality one may easily expect that she never attempted to teach the world with a rule and square, but desired only to embody in living form those prodigious generalizations in which the Master's philosophy, considered purely as philosophy, surely excelled all other systems. In fine, if

I try to sum up the whole work of this great and beautiful spirit, which has just left us, in the light of all the various views I have presented in these lectures, where we have been tracing the growth of human personality from Eschylus, through Plato, Socrates, the contemporary Greek mind, through the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Richardson, Fielding, down to Dickens and our author. find all the numerous threads of thought which have been put before you gathered into one if I say that George Eliot shows man what he may be in terms of what he is.”

I

But the best and most trenchant of Lanier's criticisms is that on Walt Whitman, though his condemnation of the author of "Leaves of Grass" was not so sweeping as it appears in the first edition of "The English Novel." The following paragraph from his original manuscript, occurring between "democratic and formless" and "I need quote but a few

scraps" (page 44, 1. 6.) was omitted, but will find its proper place in the forthcoming edition:

reserves

But let me first carefully disclaim and condemn all that flippant and sneering tone which dominates so many discussions of Whitman, While I differ from him utterly as to every principle of artistic procedure; while he seems to me the most stupendously mistaken man in all history as to what constitutes true democracy and the true advance of art and man, while I am immeasurably shocked at the sweeping invasions of those which depend on the very personality I have so much insisted upon, and which the whole consensus of the ages has considered more and more sacred with every year of growth in delicacy; yet, after all these prodigious allowances, I owe some keen delight to a certain combination of bigness and naïveté which make some of Whitman's passages so strong and taking; and indeed, on the one occasion when Whitman has abandoned his theory of formlessness and written in form, he has made 66 My Captain, O My Captain " surely one of the most tender and beautiful poems in any language.

But though Lanier elsewhere

speaks of something in Whitman which refreshed him like harsh salt spray, he was not at all disposed to accept a great new revolutionized democratic literature, which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and generally riot in a complete independence of form." Our civilization has never presented a more striking contrast than in these two men. In dress, in physique, in choice of service during the war, in purity as expressed in their writings, in ideals of art, of manfulness, of "democracy" they were essentially unlike. Perhaps it required the instinct of a soldier, as well as the taste of a man of letters, to perceive this contrast as clearly and to present it as trenchantly as Col. T. W. Higginson has done. "There could be little in common," says he, "between the fleshliness of 'Leaves of Grass' and the refined chivalry that could write, in 'The Symphony,' lines like these:

Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,
We maids would far, far whiter be
If that our eyes might sometimes see
Men maids in purity?

A man who, with pulmonary disease upon him, could still keep in his saddle as a soldier could feel but little sympathy with one who, with a superb physique prepared to serve in the hospital-honorable though that service might be for the feeblebodied. One who viewed poetic structure as a matter of art could hardly sympathize with what he would regard as mere recitative; and one who chose his material and treatment with touch and discrimination could make no terms with one who was, as he said, 'poetry's butcher,' and offered as food only 'huge raw collops cut from the rump of poet ry, and never mind gristle.''

In regard to Whitman's declaration that "meanwhile democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight-but 'tis the